Friday, June 02, 2017

SPECIAL REPORT. Media being lazy and ignorant in coverage of Trump scandal

By the Wayne Madsen ReportThe corporate media is being lazy and ignorant in its coverage of the scandal surrounding the Donald Trump administration and Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. The media would rather claim the scandal is all about Russia, when, in fact, it encompasses at least two dozen different countries involved in money laundering, registration of dummy corporations, and providing passports for key members of the Trump Organization and its criminal syndicate partner, the Kushner Companies.

The major reason why Justice Department Special Prosecutor and former FBI director Robert Mueller has tapped Andrew Weissmann, the chief of the Fraud Section of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, to assist him in his investigation of the Trump White House are the ties of the Trump and Kushner families to securities fraud and money laundering schemes. These operations involve interlocking real estate deals between the Trump and Kushner organizations and implicate not only Donald Trump and his son-in-law and presidential special adviser Jared Kushner, but also Trump's sons, Donald Trump, Jr. and Eric Trump; Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump; and Trump's closest advisers, including individuals under congressional subpoena for the "Russia" investigation. The House Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed documents maintained by President Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen and Trump campaign spokesman Boris Epshteyn.

The "Russia" investigation is a misnomer. WMR has identified several nations other than Russia that are involved in varying degrees to the Trump/Kushner real estate empire. This combined family business powerhouse has used U.S. tax laws to either skirt the law or violate it completely. The Trump/Kushner enterprise has been the subject of numerous lawsuits. An examination of these suits reveals that the Trump/Kushner enterprise uses offshore tax havens, 501(c)(3) charitable organizations, bribes -- in violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act -- limited liability corporations, dodgy banking institutions linked to money laundering, and various "pay-to-play" schemes to increase their profits. President Trump recently relaxed the law on political activities that may be engaged in by 501(c)(3) entities like the Donald J. Trump Foundation and his daughter's Ivanka Trump Foundation, the latter having recently received $100 million in donations from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The following list is of the countries, in addition to Russia, that are linked to what can safely be called the Trump-Kushner criminal syndicate:

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a recent interview that "patriotic Russians" may have been involved in conducting computer hacking of Democratic Party computer systems during the 2016 campaign, but this was a politically correct way of naming the "FSU Mafia" or "Former Soviet Union Mafia." The FSU Mafia is overwhelmingly Russian and Ukrainian Jewish. Putin keeps some of these gangster-oligarchs close in order to ascertain the nature of their operations and whether they adversely impact on Russian state security. Some of these same mafiosi figures are also close to the Trump and Kushner organizations. Consider that some of those tied to Trump and Kushner and are under investigation have similar names, for example, Boris Epshteyn and Boris Birshtein, the latter involved in the defunct Trump Tower project in Toronto.

In addition to the over 100 countries in which the Trump Organization is active, Mueller and Weissmann are scrutinizing the databases of the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN) to discover links between known Mafia companies and those under the Trump umbrella. Trump Organization companies include:

And if the above list of countries and companies are not enough to examine, consider all the firms linked to Trump and Kushner that are being looked at by the Special Prosecutor and his staff. They are headquartered in a multitude of locations with some being mere fronts for shady characters who have bought Trump condominiums in New York, Florida, and other locations.

The Trump-Kushner enterprise has enabled wealthy individuals, some subject to Interpol arrest warrants, to establish residencies at Trump or Kushner properties. Trump's private clubs, including Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, are being investigated for "pay-to-play" racketeering schemes. In April of this year, two former presidents of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe and Andres Pastrana, each paid the $100,000 Mar-a-Lago initiation fee merely to be introduced to Trump to air their opposition to Colombia's peace agreement with the leftist rebel FARC group. The two presidents sought to bend Trump's ear prior to the president's meeting the following week with Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, who hammered out the peace agreement with the FARC through the good offices of Cuba. Florida Senator Marco Rubio was identified as an interlocutor for Uribe and Pastrana and he may also be subject to the Special Prosecutor's racketeering probe of Trump's business activities.

Wealthy individuals, some of them on the lam from international law enforcement, have purchased Trump properties using corporate covers like Soho 311 LLC, Soho 3310 LLC, Soho 3203 LLC, K One Journal Square LLC, Baku XXI Century, and 65 Bay LLC. The Special Prosecutor is very likely looking at whether cash purchases of Trump and Kushner properties were first laundered and subsequently transferred to their respective businesses and/or Trump's political campaign coffers.

The Trump and Kushner criminal organizations have plenty to hide and Messrs. Mueller and Weissmann have their jobs cut out for them. WMR has attempted to draw the interconnecting relationships of the Trump-Kushner operations to the wider network of con men and foreign oligarchs. As seen in the photo below, it has been no easy task.

Because the investigations of Trump and Kushner are so complicated, the corporate media has taken the easy way out by calling the scandal the "Russian" affair. As seen from our report, Russia is but one of 102 nations and territories involved in the Trump and Kushner criminal syndicate. The scandal is a classic Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) case but the media would rather paint it as the plot of a James Bond flick.